For many years, steel fibre reinforced concrete has primarily been used in non-structural applications like industrial flooring and shotcrete. This is due to the fact that with traditional fibre dosage rates, steel fibre reinforced concrete shows a semi-ductile, strain softening post-cracking behaviour. Due to the development of new, better performing fibres, the scope of applications for steel fibre reinforced concrete has been significantly widened.
Today, steel fibres can be used as the sole reinforcement or combined with traditional reinforcement such as rebar, wire mesh or pre-stressing elements in numerous applications:
In all these applications, the use of steel fibres helps to control and reduce shrinkage cracking and allows the steel fibre reinforced concrete element to reach full ductility even though plain concrete is a brittle material.
